with her mother in a state of great content, between rows
and rows of coffins, and cases of plumes, and handles and rosettes, and
designs for monuments.

"Mrs. Church will want some chances, won't she, mother?" she said
suddenly.

"Let Mrs. Church alone, darlin'," advised Mrs. Costello. "She's not a
Catholic, and there's plenty to take chances without her!"

Alanna reluctantly assented; but she need not have worried. Mrs. Church
voluntarily took many chances, and became very enthusiastic about the
desk.

She was a pretty, clever young woman, of whom all the Costellos were
very fond. She lived with a very young husband, and a very new baby, in
a tiny cottage near the big Irish family, and pleased Mrs. Costello by
asking her advice on all domestic matters and taking it. She made the
Costello children welcome at all hours in her tiny, shining kitchen, or
sunny little dining-room. She made them candy and told them stories.
She was a minister's daughter, and wise in many delightful, girlish,
friendly ways.

And in return Mrs. Costello did her many a kindly act, and sent her
almost daily presents in the most natural manner imaginable.

But Mrs. Church made Alanna very unhappy about the raffled desk. It so
chanced that it matched exactly the other furniture in Mrs. Church's
rather bare little drawing-room, and this made her eager to win it.
Alanna, at eight, long familiar with raffles and their ways, realized
what a very small chance Mrs. Church stood of getting the desk. It
distressed her very much to notice that lady's growing certainty of
success.

She took chance after chance. And with every chance she warned Alanna
of the dreadful results of her not winning, and Alanna, with a worried
line between her eyes, protested her helplessness afresh.

"She WILL do it, Dad!" the little girl confided to him one evening,
when she and her book and her pencil were on his knee. "And it WORRIES
me so."

"Oh, I hope she wins it," said Teresa, ardently. "She's not a Catholic,
but we're praying for her. And you know people who aren't Catholics,
Dad, are apt to think that our fairs are pretty--pretty MONEY-MAKING,
you know!"

"And if only she could point to that desk," said Alanna, "and say that
she won it at a Catholic fair."

"But she won't," said Teresa, suddenly cold.

"I'm PRAYING she will," said Alanna, suddenly.

"Oh, I don't think you ought, do you, Dad?" said Teresa, gravely. "Do
you think she ought, Mommie? That's